Saturday, August 6, 2011

WEUS and Woodstock Times Spotlight Mitchell Langbert's Blog

This morning Dennis K. Thomas of Altamont Springs/Orlando's WEUS radio (the Internet Boomer Radio station is here -- the WEUS air station is here) interviewed me on his morning Boomer Show. We discussed the importance of gold and silver ownership in retirement planning, especially in light of the Obama credit debacle. I had been saying that 50 Bush messes fit into the Obama mess. The number will ultimately be greater.

Dennis is a great guy. He was quite complimentary of my resume. He awarded me the coveted "Boomer of the Week" title, which was a thrill, and he asked me to be on his Social Security board of observers. I'm hoping for return visits.

I like the appellation gadfly, but right wing is inaccurate. The term right wing comes from the seating on the right in the French Estates General in the 1780s to early 1800s of monarchists whose views are repugnant to me. I am sympathetic to de Jouvenal's concerns about centralization of power (who isn't?), but I believe in Hamiltonian republicanism limited by a Jeffersonian concern for states' rights, including secession. Wikipedia describes right wing as follows:

In politics, Right, right-wing and rightist are generally used to describe support for preservation or promotion of social order and the legitimacy of social hierarchy in society that is often advocated in the name of tradition.It involves in varying degrees the rejection of egalitarian objectives ... The terms Right and Left were coined during the French Revolution, referring to seating arrangements in parliament; those who sat on the right supported preserving the institutions of the Ancien Régime (the monarchy, the aristocracy and the established church).Use of the term "Right" became more prominent after the second restoration of the French monarchy in 1815 with the Ultra-royalists.

Right wing doesn't apply to libertarians, and opposition to UN Agenda 21 is an anti-authoritarian hence left-wing position. This might not be palatable to right wing Progressives, like Smart and The Woodstock Times's readership. Nor does right wing properly apply to most conservatives, although the very appellation conservative is also a throwback. There is no such thing as a real conservative in America because the views called conservative are of more recent, Jacksonian origin than the Hamiltonian, Federalist and Whig views called progressive. American progressivism is a throwback to mercantilism of the 17th century; American conservatism builds on the late 19th century views of Alfred Marshall and the 20th century views of President William Howard Taft.

In the meaning of lifestyle and religion, libertarians may or may not be traditionalists. Whether they are or not, libertarians do not believe in the use of state violence or authority to enforce traditional or any other lifestyle.

Libertarians do not reject egalitarianism, which the left almost always voices and almost always ignores. I have never seen more hierarchical, authoritarian institutions than the left-and-progressive dominated universities in which I work. An old trick of the left is to claim that they favor democracy and egalitarianism and then create institutions which exclude the majority, who lack the resources to manipulate institutional levers. Smart's article is even handed for a leftist publication like The Woodstock Times, but one can guess that the pro-freedom reaction to the corrupt, Agenda 21-driven Town plan irritates the authoritarian Woodstock and Olive progressives in Smart's readership.

To understand how leftist hierarchy and oppression are part and parcel of the left's claim to "social justice" (a vacuous term that meant murdering millions to Hitler and Stalin) one need only observe the long standing strategy of Progressivism to staunch small operators and individuals through escalation of regulatory costs. Kip Viscusi of Harvard and my professor at Columbia, Ann Bartel, documented this pattern with respect to OSHA, and I documented it with respect to ERISA. Complex regulation makes it difficult for small operators to do business. The cost of regulation falls less heavily on large organizations that can spread costs across a wider range of units of output.

Wealthier home owners are in an analogous position to larger firms. They can more easily absorb costs that drive away lower-income homeowners whose houses wealthy left-wingers can purchase at a discount. Agenda 21's costly environmental regulation can be borne by people making over $100,000 but not by people earning less. Median homeowners are ground under progressives' regulatory Gucci heels to the rich progressives' direct benefit, both environmental and economic. The only thing more right wing than someone who opposes equality is someone who says that they favor equality and uses government violence in the name of equality to enforce an inequality that benefits themselves. That is PROGRESSIVISM.

Less intelligent Progressives may actually believe that oppressive regulation that sends lower-wage homeowners into concentrated urban developments serves humanity, but smart Democratic operators like George Soros and Warren Buffett are well aware that the costly regulation that they advocate drives out smaller competitors, creating an open playing field for them. Thus, billionaire Democrats like the Town of Olive's Bruce Ratner can sit back and snap up properties that have been forcibly vacated by progressive regulation like Agenda 21. Though incapable of intelligent thinking about her actions, Linda Burkhardt well serves the opportunism of the rich. Progressivism is a passive-aggressive ideology that Agenda 21 reflects. It claims to be helping humanity as it sends low-income homeowners to concentration camps like the LEED project Birchez, from which I was ejected by City of Kingston police acting as the Democratic Party's muscle men and out of their jurisdiction while claiming to be Town of Ulster police.

Google Custom Search

Pages

Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.